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HE’S EMERGING AS THE ACE OF HIS PLACE : In His Fourth Season, Angel Left-Hander Chuck Finley Has the Number of American League Batters

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Throughout his career, Dave Winfield wore uniform number 31. Always.

Through Little League, the University of Minnesota, National League, nine years in the American League. So, when the New York Yankees traded him to the Angels a few weeks ago, he naturally asked for 31.

Winfield, baseball’s active leader in runs batted in and a 12-time all-star, wanted it. Pitcher Chuck Finley, who has 11 fewer all-star selections to his credit, had it.

Finley still has it.

That’s not because he is a slave to superstition and not because Winfield didn’t try good-naturedly to coax him into giving it up. Finley kept his number because Winfield came to realize, as have Angel opponents, that the 27-year-old left-hander deserves that kind of respect for his accomplishments and for the boundless potential he continues to fulfill in his fourth full major league season.

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“I felt like I had done things to earn the number,” Finley said, not boastfully but with the quiet self-confidence of a sparkling 16-9 season behind him.

“I wore 31 all during college and the minor leagues. It would be different if this was my first year or I didn’t have success. He and I did talk about it and he understood. He was very professional. If he wanted it bad enough, he could have said, ‘I want this,’ but he didn’t.”

Firmly as he stood on that point of pride, the 6-6, 212-pound Louisiana native insisted that the numbers that matter more than those on his back are those he accumulates by the end of the season. In 1989, those numbers were eye opening.

To complement his career-best 16 victories--a total only three Angel left-handers had reached before him--Finley compiled a 2.57 earned-run average, second only to Cy Young Award winner Bret Saberhagen of Kansas City. His nine complete games ranked third-best in the American League and he struck out 156 batters, the eighth-best total.

Boosted by the addition of a forkball to his curveball and a lively fastball that can reach 92 m.p.h, Finley stymied left-handed hitters. He held them to a .172 batting average and no home runs in 199 2/3 innings, while limiting righties to a .243 average.

“The advent of his forkball pushed him over the hump,” pitching coach Marcel Lachemann said. “It gave him a third quality pitch people had to be aware of.”

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Being aware of it didn’t make it easier to hit. Finley’s hits-per-innings ratio of 0.86 placed him behind such luminaries as Nolan Ryan, Saberhagen, Toronto veteran Dave Stieb, Oakland’s Mike Moore and Boston’s Roger Clemens.

Angel catcher Lance Parrish boldly grouped him with another left-hander of some repute.

“It’s hard to draw comparisons, but he resembles Steve Carlton in stature and effectiveness,” said Parrish, who became Finley’s batterymate last season.

“Both have, or had, a different repertoire. Carlton relied on his slider and his fastball. Chuck doesn’t throw a slider, but he’s got that real effective forkball instead. It’s a deceptive pitch because it looks, coming out of his hand, like a fastball. He throws it with good arm motion and it looks like he’s throwing a fastball and then the bottom falls out. If he takes a little off, it works as a changeup.”

It changed the course of his career.

“Without it, I would have been in the minors two or three more years,” he said.

Instead, he had a brilliant year in 1989, highlighted by his one-hitter against the Boston Red Sox May 26 in Fenway Park. But even then, he didn’t immediately get the recognition he merited.

Said shortstop Jody Reed, whose two-out single in the eighth ended the no-hit bid, “You’ve really got to take your hat off to that Steve Finley.”

So what if Reed didn’t know his name, or that some people might not know that the Angels’ most successful left-hander this season isn’t Mark Langston, whose services cost them $16-million in last winter’s free-agent feeding frenzy. The Angels’ big winner so far is Finley, whose 8-3 record and 2.71 ERA reaffirm his place among the game’s top pitchers.

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“I don’t know if people know who I am, but I don’t really care,” he said. “I know who I am, my teammates know and the guys who bat against me know I’m a pretty capable, pretty complete pitcher.

“If you go out and do the job enough times, people will realize what you can do without you saying it. If somebody notices and says, ‘Nice game,’ it’s gratifying to know you’re appreciated. But I don’t really need to hear it.”

There’s no way to know whether the outcome of last summer’s title race would have been different if Finley hadn’t injured his left foot Aug. 21 while warming up for a start against the Royals, but it’s tempting to speculate. The day of his misstep, the Angels were tied for the West Division lead. While he lost four turns, including the game in Kansas City he left after 17 pitches, they lost 13 of their next 18 games.

“When I did that, I thought it wasn’t a big deal because I was still able to walk,” he said. “Then I tried to pitch, and I just couldn’t. I try not to think about what could have happened. We could have done the same thing (faded out of the race) with me there. It would be easy to say, ‘I wasn’t there and the team was in a skid.’ ”

A hint of wistfulness crept into his voice.

“I was on a roll and we all were throwing well,” he said. “We had a real strong chain as a pitching staff, and me going down takes one link out of that chain. The guys did the best they could. They picked it up toward the end but there weren’t enough days left.”

That Finley would play so pivotal a part in a title race seemed unlikely as recently as 1988, when he was 9-15 in his first year as a starter.

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“I thought I threw the ball pretty well but the team was kind of going in different directions,” he said. “We’d have a good week and then a bad week. It was a learning process. It was more like a steppingstone for what was to come.”

Not that it appeared he would come to much at all early in his career.

Selected by the Angels in the first round of the secondary phase of the January, 1985, free-agent draft, Finley didn’t make the most favorable of impressions at a camp for drafted players held at Cal State Fullerton. He was all elbows, legs and kick the first time Joe Coleman watched him, a fury of motion and raw power begging for refinement.

“I saw somebody that was 6-foot-6, who was pitching like he was 5-foot-10,” said Coleman, then a minor league pitching instructor for the Angels and now their bullpen coach.

“When I saw the first couple of fastballs he threw after he loosened up, I said, ‘Geez, it doesn’t look like there’s much there.’ A few fastballs after that, I almost swallowed my tobacco. I knew he was special.”

He required special attention from the Angels before his vast talent could be mined. His minor league apprenticeship was brief, 29 innings with Class A Salem in 1985 and 12 with Class A Quad Cities in 1986, all in relief.

But he used his time well, as Coleman and Lachemann taught him to modify his delivery so he would be at a more upright angle that took advantage of his imposing height. He also changed his motion so that he no longer threw across his body, gaining a better angle on the strike zone.

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But he got his real education on the job, in a major league uniform.

“He was a short (relief) man for us because at that time we had very few left-handers in the organization and no left-handed closers,” Coleman said. “We thought we’d start him out as a closer because we weren’t really sure if he’d develop a good enough breaking ball to get him into a starting situation.

“The next year (1986) he started at Quad Cities, and about a quarter of the way into the season, Marcel gave me a call asking for left-handers. I told him, ‘Right now, the only left-hander throwing good enough is Finley.’ He chuckled and said, ‘Let me talk to (Manager) Gene Mauch and I’ll get back to you,’ and they said they wanted him.”

Told that he’d be moving up, Finley thought that meant double A. It meant the Show, the big leagues, in the biggest city he had ever seen, New York.

“I always wanted to go to New York, and there I was, coming from Waterloo (Iowa) and the first place I go is New York and the first stadium I go to is Yankee Stadium,” said Finley, whose hometown of Monroe, La., has a population of 130,000.

“There were more people in one place than I’d seen in my life. It happened to be hat day or beach-towel day or something like that and I couldn’t believe all those people. Then you see all those (plaques) on the wall and everything. It was really something.

“I’m a little more comfortable in places like that now, but I still don’t get too cocky in the city. I stay close to the hotel, but I might venture out every now and then.”

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Finley didn’t make his major league debut until four days later, May 29. It coincided with the debut of the late, late show back home, where his parents, Charles and Sue, thrilled from afar via their satellite dish.

“They got it the first year I went to big league camp, because they had trouble getting Cablevision out to the house,” said Finley, who is close to his family. “They thought it would be neat to watch Angels games whether I was there or not.

“Two months later, I told them ‘Watch, you might see me.’ The day they saw me on TV in an Angel uniform at Yankee Stadium, my dad said it was worth everything it cost.”

Watching their son pitch late innings in late-starting West Coast games cost his parents a good deal of sleep. They were as delighted as he was when he became a starter late in 1987, a season he ended with a 2-7 record and 4.67 ERA after three starts and 32 relief appearances, mostly as a mop-up man.

“I asked them to make the switch so it would be easier on my mom and dad,” Finley joked.

Being a starter in 1988 was no laugh. Fifteen of the games he started were decided by two runs or fewer and in nine of his 15 losses, the Angels scored two runs or fewer.

“That was experience under fire,” Coleman said. “He was 9-15 but he pitched much better than that, and that was without the forkball. It was his rookie year, so to speak, as a starter. We knew if we could come up with a third pitch, he’d be able to turn things around.”

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It took a considerable effort.

“I never thought it would be easy, that the wins would keep clicking and clicking,” Finley said. “I saw when I was in the pen that you could pitch well and not win.

“For me, it was a matter of being put in situations I’d never been into. You can feel you’re capable and people can tell you and tell you, ‘You can do this and do that,’ but until you do it, well, the only way you’re going to get better or worse is by doing it.

“Things clicked midway through the ’88 season. I can’t put my finger on what it was. But I remember a couple of games where I felt completely in control. I’d get into situations and say, ‘I know how to get out of this,’ instead of falling to pieces. Plus I added the changeup (last season), which gave me a little bit different look and another pitch I could get over for strikes.”

He struck out nearly twice as many batters as he walked last season--82 walks, 156 strikeouts--a ratio he has improved this season. In 73 innings, he has walked 22 and struck out 47, better than 2-1, and more impressive because he has not consistently had the “stuff” he had last season, whether lockout-related or otherwise.

For Finley to win by pitching and not by blowing hitters away is another significant milepost.

“That’s an indication how well he’s learned how to pitch,” Lachemann said.

“Talk to any successful starting pitcher and he’ll say he has his good stuff maybe one-quarter of the time. The ones that end up being really good are capable of winning when they don’t have their good stuff. If you can win half of those games, or over half, and win a great majority of the ones where you do have your good stuff, you’ll be a good one. If you can’t win when you don’t have good stuff, you’re going to be mediocre.

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“Right now he’s one of the premier left-handers in the league and that’s pretty good.”

Good though he is on the mound, he seems to have problems completing simple functions such as walking. A slip on a rain-slicked step in Toronto left him with a sprained right ankle and cost him a start May 18.

In his next start, May 22, he tried to kick a chair in the dugout after he was removed from the game, and missed. After being routed by the Rangers June 2 at Texas before more than 30 friends and relatives, he stomped angrily to the dugout--and hit his head on the roof.

“Aw, that was a freak deal,” he said. “Two months from now, I could stumble on the carpet or hit my head on a pipe and people are going to remind me about what I’ve done and say, ‘What else is going to happen to him?’ ” “Just because of the position I’m in, it gets a little more hype.”

The position he’d most like to be in is starting a World Series game for the Angels. A taste of the American League playoffs in 1986, when he made three appearances and pitched two innings, made him hunger for more.

“I didn’t have that big a role that year and now I’ve got a little bigger part to play,” he said. “That’s everybody’s goal, to play in the World Series the first time. Once you’re here, you work that much harder to get there. I know I’m working hard for that and everybody else here is striving for the same thing.”

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